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Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Epistemic

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\\jciprod01\productn\C\CJP\26-3\CJP305.txt unknown Seq: 1 18-MAY-17 15:07 F ELIX´ GONZALEZ-TORRES’S ´ EPISTEMIC ART Robert Hobbs* Latin-American, gay, and AIDS positive, F´elix Gonz´alez-Torres seemed to be the perfect model for both the late 1980s and early ’90s culture wars, which emphasized sex and diversity. Because Gonz´alez- Torres’s life made him such an apt subject for addressing social and po- litical wrongs, many critics and art historians premiered both him and his art when discussing these hotly debated issues. But Gonz´alez-Torres himself regarded these personal matters separately from his epistemolog- ically oriented work. In an interview with fellow artist Tim Rollins, he discussed his desire to critique mainstream culture from within its struc- ture and accepted practice rather than serve as one of its pawns: “I love the idea of being an infiltrator. I always said that I wanted to be a spy . I don’t want to be the opposition because the opposition always serves a purpose . .”1 Because Gonz´alez-Torres understood the need to focus his energies within established art discourses rather than mounting attacks from the outside, his art, with its important epistemological and ontologi- cal innovations, places him in a direct line with such major twentieth- century artist-thinkers as dadaist Marcel Duchamp, minimalists Donald Judd and Robert Morris, and earth artist Robert Smithson. Although he often alluded to his partner, Ross Laycock, in a number of works, Gonz´alez-Torres straightforwardly presented a series of HIV- positive blood count charts with their gridded formats resembling the look of Minimalism, and drew on Latino festivals in his works consisting of strings of light bulbs and Caribbean d´ecor in his beaded curtains. These works, predicated on a dialectic of public and private spheres, were each drily presented, thus enabling Gonz´alez-Torres to focus on creating innovative epistemologically-oriented works that employ tradi- tional concepts of the way art objects function and accrue meaning while challenging them. In addition, he generously found ways for viewers of * Noted art historian Dr. Robert Hobbs has written widely on modern and contemporary art. He is the author of more than 40 books and numerous essays. His many major exhibitions have been shown at important museums nationally and internationally, including U.S. official representations at the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Bienal. Hobbs has served as associ- ate professor at Cornell University, long-term visiting professor at Yale University, and has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. 1 Interview by Tim Rollins with F´elix Gonz´alez-Torres, in New York City, N.Y. (Apr. 16 & June 12, 1993), in TIM ROLLINS ET AL, FELIX´ GONZ ALEZ´ -TORRES 20 (William S. Bart- man ed. 1993). 483 \\jciprod01\productn\C\CJP\26-3\CJP305.txt unknown Seq: 2 18-MAY-17 15:07 484 CORNELL JOURNAL OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 26:483 his work to participate actively in the process of artistic perception and to collaborate in the construction of the art’s dynamic and changing rele- vance, even as he anticipated some of their responses. Admittedly, the subjects of his art may, at times, be romantic in their allusions to past intimacies and the themes may call to mind human fragility, but the works themselves comprise an astonishing groundbreaking rigor, and its effects are still inspiring artists thirty years later. As an introduction to this overall discussion on art and justice that focuses on Gonz´alez-Torres’s art, I would like to review in chronological order some of the extraordinary and progressive innovations he was able to originate in pieces created during the nine years—1986 to 1995—that he was able to create the cutting-edge art for which he has become justly renowned. I start with his most secretive work, an early piece that he describes in the following way: There’s a piece where I mail the owner something every so often and it goes into this big box. This piece should never be shown. The person who buys this empty box gets these things in the mail. The piece [Gonz´alez- Torres reiterates] is not meant to be shown. I like working with contradictions: making completely private, almost secretive work on the one hand, and on the other, making work that is truly public and accessible.2 While German critic Jeanne Haunschild appends a political interpretation to this piece by viewing it in terms of the attempts to impose proscrip- tions against certain private love acts between gays and lesbians,3 this reading, as relevant as it is, does not recognize Gonz´alez-Torres’s prece- dence in creating a work of art that focuses on communication, even though it is not intended to be publicly shown. Gonz´alez-Torres, in other words, has created a work of art that accords with the key fundamental idea of visual art’s eminent perceptibility, and yet he has done so while restricting its communiqu´e to one specific collector. While this very private work of art plays with the established public norm traditionally associated with western mainstream visual art, Gonz´a- lez-Torres’s puzzle pieces literalize one of this tradition’s ongoing truisms concerning art’s ability to constitute a repository of special meaning in the form of mysteries needing to be solved, so that informed individuals, schooled in symbols, signs, emblems, and semiotic practices, are able figure out an artwork’s meaning. But, instead of secreting mean- ing in a repository as the aforementioned box, Gonz´alez-Torres relies in 2 Id. at 14. 3 See Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986). \\jciprod01\productn\C\CJP\26-3\CJP305.txt unknown Seq: 3 18-MAY-17 15:07 2017] FELIX´ GONZALEZ´ -TORRES’S EPISTEMIC ART 485 some of his more public pieces on the genre of puzzles as a foundation for snapshots and photo-journalist images taken from mass media and sometimes even on personal sources. At one point, he had photographs of segments of Ross’s love letters made into jigsaw puzzles,4 thereby incorporating private biographical information in these works, so that they also reify and wryly comment on the concept of art as integrally connected with the artist and his own life. Gonz´alez-Torres preferred to work within established art systems, becoming in his word, like a “virus,”5 which attacks and undermines from within a structure that he might at first appear to be only emulating. He has related: “I don’t want a revolution anymore, it’s too much energy for too little. So I want to work within the system. I want to work within the contradictions of the system . .”6 As Gonz´alez-Torres’s New York dealer Andrea Rosen has percep- tively concluded, “So many aspects of F´elix’s work were groundbreaking that he felt that it was essential to house all the innovation within the traditional model of the art object.”7 Even though Gonz´alez-Torres wished to work with the established structure of art, he also intended to change and even desecrate it a little as he told then Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector: . [W]e should not be afraid of using such formal refer- ences [as Minimalism] since they represent authority and history. Why not take them? When we insert our own discourse into these forms, we soil them. We make them dark. We make them our own and that is our final re- venge. We become part of the language of the authority, part of history.8 A classic example of Gonz´alez-Torres’s dissembling work from within the established artistic discourse of blue-chip Minimalism is his series of stacks, initiated in 1988 and continued for several years thereaf- ter. Although these works might resemble simulations of Donald Judd’s and Robert Morris’s cubes, they are comprised of hundreds of sheets of printed-paper that visitors can choose to take if they wish. These works 4 2 DIETMAR ELGER & ANDREA ROSEN, FELIX´ GONZ ALEZ´ -TORRES CATALOGUE´ RAI- SONNE 82-84 (Cantz Verlag 1997). 5 Interview by Hans-Ulrich Obrist with F´elix Gonz´alez-Torres (1994) in 1 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, INTERVIEWS 315 (Charta 2003) (“I used to be the one that looks like something else in order to function as a virus. I mean, the virus is our worst enemy, but should also be our model in terms of not being the opposite anymore, not being very easily defined so that we can attach ourselves to institutions which are always going to be there.”). 6 Andrea Rosen, “‘Untitled’ (The Neverending Portrait)” in ROLLINS, supra note 1, at 44, 46. 7 ROLLINS, supra note 1, at 44, 46. 8 NANCY SPECTOR, FELIX´ GONZ ALEZ´ -TORRES 15 (1995). \\jciprod01\productn\C\CJP\26-3\CJP305.txt unknown Seq: 4 18-MAY-17 15:07 486 CORNELL JOURNAL OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 26:483 allow collectors to decide if they are going to replenish them during an exhibition to create the aura of perpetual generosity or if they are going to allow the sheets making up the stacks to dwindle. The act of incorpo- rating time in these pieces, as well as collectors’ responsibilities and viewers’ desires to participate in the work of art by taking part of it, significantly modifies the traditional ontological structure of Minimalist work as it transfers sole responsibility for its creation by the artist and permits collectors and viewers to collaborate in generating these pieces that assume the character of scores to be performed.
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